#FAIL: Why Meme Campaigns Flop

Objective(s)

  • 500 views, 2000 reputation points on Imgur (didn’t achieve)
  • 50 likes, 2 shares, 5 comments on Facebook (didn’t achieve)
  • 150 likes, 5 comments on Instagram (didn’t achieve)
  • Earn 3 new followers on Instagram (achieved)
  • Earn 5 new followers on Twitter (didn’t achieve)

Imgur Meme

But like can you not

Twitter Webcard Tweet

Twitter Ad Engagement

View post on imgur.com

Analysis

Overall, my campaign wasn’t very effective. I only received 375 views on Imgur, despite using various strategies on multiple channels. Because my meme didn’t perform as well as I expected early on, I completely deviated from my campaign. Every other day, I reshared my Imgur meme to the community with different hashtags and captions. I would hope that, like retweeting your own tweet or with A/B testing, the Imgur meme would gain more traction. Unfortunately, this attempt was futile, and only resulted in a couple of views each time I reshared to the community. I even uploaded another meme to help boost my reputation within the Imgur community.

I’ll analyze the tactics I used for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and GroupMe.

Facebook

On Facebook, I shared my meme on my timeline three times, and only received a couple of likes, and no likes on my posts. I eventually deleted the posts on my timeline because they performed so poorly and got no reception.

I shared my meme to three Facebook groups: sorority, high school graduation class, and Zipped magazine. What ended up being the most effective strategy was, rather than generally posting on my timeline, directly asking friends to click the link. This direct call-to-action seemed to be more effective in getting likes and receiving engagement.

Instagram

I posted my meme to my Instagram page and story, and got very little impressions and engagement. Only 40 people looked at my story, while only 32 people liked my meme. I got no comments on the image, so after two days of embarrassing engagement, I deleted the image. Featuring the image to my Instagram page only resulted in five clicks on my Imgur meme. The reason for this poor performance was most likely the result of the meme’s weird placement in my personalized, aesthetically-driven feed. Because the meme completed deviated from my usual posting habits, my followers were probably confused as to the reason I promoted this content.

GroupMe

I posted the image link to four GroupMe’s: my member class of my sorority, my sorority’s house, and two fraternities. This helped drive up my numbers the most, besides my paid advertisement. Again, a direct call-to-action and pin-pointing a specific audience help drive up my engagement. Because my meme is such a niche audience, by targeting friends or members of that audience (SVU lovers), I can expand from that audience, without being at the whim of the void of the Internet. Continuing on my GroupMe strategy, I directly texted my group chats or members of fraternities, asking to click on the link and share it with their friends, as well.

Twitter

Despite my multiple strategies through Twitter of A/B testing, directly retweeting, deleting tweets and then tweeting them again, the most effective way to boost engagement was through targeted ads. As I selected a specific audience and SVU fan groups, I was able to target the people that would find my meme funny. This boosted my views by over 150. Because of my low follower count and Klout score, generally posting my meme to the Internet sphere wasn’t as effective as paying to get my content out there. I think that overall, because of the niche nature of my content, my meme wasn’t destined to do that well, especially given other TV shows monopolizing the Internet’s conversations, like 13 Reasons Why and Game of Thrones. I tried targeting those audiences with #binge and tagging them in the tweet (as seen in my webcard).

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